“How about your big case against me?” Simon asked after a while. “Aside from my breaches of the peace, I mean. Is that coming along?”
Kearney flexed his jaw muscles.
“We got a letter this afternoon. It was addressed to the Chief, and it was signed by Cleve Friend. It said he was mixed up in some deal with you and he was trying to get out of it because he’d got cold feet. And he was afraid you wouldn’t let him get out. You’d threatened to kill him unless he played along. The letter said he was leaving it with a friend, to be mailed if he — died.”
The Saint kept his eyes straight ahead.
“Did you check the signature?”
“It was Friend’s signature all right. A little shaky, but it compared.”
“Shaky?” Simon pondered. “And I bet the letter itself was typewritten.”
“It was.”
“It would be. Either Friend signed under the influence of scopolamine — which is a hypnotic — or else he was tortured into signing it.”
“You can explain anything, can’t you?” Kearney gibed. “Somebody’s trying to frame you, of course.”
“Of course,” Simon agreed coolly. “That should be obvious, even to a policeman.”
“Yeah? And how did they make this Varing dame disappear?”
“Probably through a secret passage...”
His voice trailed away as the thought hit him like a splash of cold water between the eyes.
“My God,” he said softly. “Secret passages. Of course. What a feeble-minded flop I am!”
“Hey!” Kearney squawked suddenly. “Where do you think you’re going? This ain’t the way to Headquarters.”
“It’s the way I’m taking,” said the Saint. “Come in, Hoppy.”
Mr Uniatz rose from behind the front seat and applied the muzzle of his Betsy to the nape of Kearney’s neck. “Okay, copper,” he said. “Take it easy.”
The detective’s face went white, then red.
“You can’t get away with this,” he said desperately.
“We can try,” said the Saint. “I’ve just had an inspiration, and I’m going to be much too busy to horse around with any footling rap about disturbing the peace.”
He sped the car west on Roosevelt, and presently turned up Central Avenue to Columbus Park, where he stopped.
“Okay, Hoppy,” he said.
“De woiks, boss?”
“Just let him take a nap,” Simon said hastily.
Mr Uniatz raised his gun and brought it down with professional precision, and the detective napped...
Simon found Kearney’s keys, unlocked the handcuffs, and transferred them to the detective’s wrists. He took Kearney’s badge and identification, figuring that a handcuffed man without credentials would be more than ordinarily delayed in starting a hue and cry. Then they took Kearney out of the car and laid him under a tree with his hat over his face, and drove quickly away.
The Saint’s brain flogged itself pitilessly under the impassive mask of his face.
“Secret passages,” he repeated, as he opened up the headlights on the road to Wheaton. “Hoppy, I ought to have my head examined.”
“What for, boss?”
“Maggots. What the hell’s the first thing you’d expect to find in a hide-out that used to belong to Al Capone? And don’t you remember Sammy said he had a safe place to hide Junior?”
“Sure.”
“Well, it was safe. So safe that Kearney couldn’t find it. But we’ll find it this time, if we have to blast for it. And then we’ll know whether Sammy and his friend Fingers double-crossed us, or if the King caught up with them.”
He reconnoitered the house carefully, but there were no signs of a police guard, and a ground-floor window succumbed in short order to the Saint’s expert manipulation. It was after that that the problems began to multiply, and it took two hours of methodical labour to work them out.
They finally found the “safe place” by tortuously tracing a ventilating pipe that seemed to have an outlet but no inlet. Even then the field was merely narrowed down to the cellar, and it took an inch-by-inch investigation to settle on the probable entrance. Hoppy’s reminiscences of bootlegging days were helpful and diverting, sometimes gruesome, but in the end they had to use crowbars to break down the brick wall. There was a steel plate beneath that, but once its locking mechanism was revealed it surrendered to a piece of bailing wire. It let them into a small, comfortably furnished room with a ventilating plate in the ceiling, where Sammy the Leg, trussed like an unsinged chicken, lay philosophically on a cot, and looked at them.
“Chees, pal,” Hoppy said, as he worked on Sammy’s ropes with a jack-knife. “We t’ought ya’d been bumped or sump’n.”
“Not me,” Sammy grunted. He tested his limbs experimentally. “Thanks, Saint. I figured I was gonna cash in for sure. Those lousy swine just meant me to lie here and starve.”
“Didn’t you hear us?” Simon asked. “You could have saved us some time if you’d yelled.”
“It wouldn’t have done no good. This room’s soundproofed. I heard you just now, sure, but you couldn’t of heard me. Besides, how did I know who it was? I could tell somebody was busting in, so I let ’em bust. Not that I could have stopped you.” Sammy walked stiffly back and forth like a shaggy bear, pausing at the door. “Had to break in, didn’t you? It’ll cost dough to fix that.” He grimaced. “Hell. C’mon upstairs. I’m starving.”
But the first thing Sammy the Leg did was to extract a beer bottle from his refrigerator, uncap it, and guzzle the contents. He wiped his mouth with a hairy hand, sighed, and eyed the Saint malevolently.
“Lousy double-crosser,” he said. “Nope, not you. I mean Fingers. Go on, sit down. Have a beer. Wait a sec.”
He went back to the refrigerator and brought out a plate of pig’s knuckles.
“How did it happen?” Simon asked.
“Fingers Schultz,” Sammy said, gnawing a knuckle. “Just goes to show. Never trust nobody. That little snake’s been with me for three years. Thought I could depend on him. Sure I could — till he started figuring I was a has-been and somebody else could pay off better, and protect him.”
“Like the King of the Beggars?” Simon prompted.
“I wouldn’t know about that. Fingers brought Frankie Weiss here. They stuck me up. Fingers knew about that room downstairs and how to get into it. They took that guy you left here away with them, and left me like you found me. Funny — he didn’t seem so happy about them finding him, like you’d expect.”
“Junior’s hunches were working fine,” Simon told him cold-bloodedly. “They asked him all the questions they had to, and then rubbed him out.”
Sammy reflectively chewed a knucklebone, his small eyes studying the Saint. Finally he sighed.
“That’s too bad. I guess he had it coming, but that don’t do you no good.” A pig’s knuckle cracked disconcertingly in Sammy’s huge grip. He got up, found another bottle, and lifted it to his mouth. “Who’s gonna pay for messing up my cellar?” he demanded abruptly. “All it takes to open it is to stick a wire in the right place between the bricks. You didn’t have to wreck it like that.”
“How much will the repairs cost?” Simon asked.
“Say two hundred.”
The Saint smiled.
“That’s a coincidence. My charge for rescuing people who are tied up and left to die is exactly two hundred fish. Shall we call it square?”
Sammy said without rancour, “I didn’t figure it would work on you, but there was no harm trying. Fingers is the guy who ought to pay for it. But when I catch up with Fingers he won’t be in no shape to sign cheques.”
Simon lighted a cigarette. “You’re right about Junior’s rubbing-out doing me no good,” he said. “As a matter of fact, they’re working pretty hard at trying to frame me for it. You’ll be interested to know that part of the frame was a deed of gift on this house from you to me. Now we know more about it, it wasn’t such a bad set-up at all. You’d never show up to contest the title; and if anyone ever did find your body, it’d have been in my house and looked just as if I’d bumped you and forged the deed... The King is quite a sweet little schemer, it turns out.”